When the earth trembles

So do human beliefs

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recalled his early boyhood as generally pleasant. His sixth birthday found him secure in his world.

“But an extraordinary event deeply disturbed the boy's peace of mind, for the first time,” the German writer recalled of himself many years later. “On the 1st of November, 1755, the earthquake at Lisbon took place, and spread a prodigious alarm over the world, long accustomed to peace and quiet. A great and magnificent capital, which was at the same time a trading and mercantile city, is smitten, without warning, by a most fearful calamity. The earth trembles and totters, the sea roars up, ships dash together, houses fall in, and over them churches and towers, the royal palace is in part swallowed by the waters, the bursting land seems to vomit flames, since smoke and fire are seen everywhere amid the ruins. Sixty thousand persons, a moment before in case and comfort, fall together, and he is to be deemed most fortunate who is no longer capable of a thought or feeling about the disaster.”

Goethe wasn’t the only one unsettled by the Lisbon earthquake. It happened amid the European Enlightenment, when scientists were starting to get a handle on the natural mechanisms of the earth, thereby reducing reliance on the supernatural. Yet philosophers and theologians still wrestled with the problem of theodicy: of reconciling the existence of evil with a belief in the goodness and omnipotence of God. If God is good and all powerful, how does evil persist in the world?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German polymath, explained that the world humans inhabited was the best of all possible worlds. He chose his words carefully (in German, Latin and French). It wasn’t the best of all conceivable worlds, merely the best possible. If rendered better in one particular, it would necessarily have been made worse in another. An important illustration involved free will, which Leibniz – and most people – considered a good thing. God could reduce the evil humans do but only at the expense of their free will.

Leibniz’s critics weren’t convinced. Some caricatured his argument as saying everything was for the best. Others contended that God could have designed people to want to do good. The critics really piled on when it came to forces of nature. Nature has no free will. Yet nature kills people – with blizzards, floods and, yes, earthquakes – and God doesn’t intervene.

François-Marie Arouet, called Voltaire, was already a skeptic of the Leibnizian view when the Lisbon calamity sent him over the top. The death toll at Lisbon rendered the distinction between the possible and the conceivable a ghastly joke, a gruesome exercise in scholastic hairsplitting. Voltaire wrote a long poem (in French) titled “On the Lisbon disaster; or an Examination of the Axiom ‘All is Well.’”

More tellingly, Voltaire made the earthquake a plot point in his novella Candide. The title character, a young man learning about the world, arrived in Portugal in company with Pangloss, a philosopher of Leibnizian persuasion. They reached Lisbon at the moment the earthquake struck. “They felt the earth tremble under their feet. The sea swelled and foamed in the harbour, and beat to pieces the vessels riding at anchor. Whirlwinds of fire and ashes covered the streets and public places; houses fell, roofs were flung upon the pavements, and the pavements were scattered. Thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.”

Candide nearly perished amid the carnage. Pangloss revived him, meanwhile reflecting on the meaning of what had happened. “They joined with others in relieving those inhabitants who had escaped death. Some, whom they had succoured, gave them as good a dinner as they could in such disastrous circumstances; true, the repast was mournful, and the company moistened their bread with tears; but Pangloss consoled them, assuring them that things could not be otherwise. ‘For,’ said he, ‘all that is, is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere.’” The earthquake was initially attributed to an underground volcano. “‘It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right.’"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau read Voltaire and thought he drew the wrong conclusion from the Lisbon earthquake. The shaking might have been the work of God or nature, but the human toll was man’s doing. “Admit, for example,” he wrote to Voltaire, “that nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories there, and that if the inhabitants of this great city had been more equally spread out and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been much less, and perhaps of no account. All of them would have fled at the first disturbance, and the next day they would have been seen twenty leagues from there, as gay as if nothing had happened.” People should return to a more natural state, and they would be spared such disasters as befell Lisbon.

Nearly three centuries later, humans continue to debate the meaning of the Lisbon earthquake. But these days the debate takes place largely among seismologists, who look for fault neither in God nor in humans but in the crust of the earth — that is. in the geological fault whose slippage caused the quake. Voltaire’s Candide is read more for its humor than for its philosophy. Leibniz is remembered as a co-founder (with Isaac Newton) of calculus. Rousseau's advice about moving out of cities has morphed into stricter building codes.

Goethe regained his equanimity. He grew up to become the greatest of German writers, a hero of the Romantic era in European literature and art. He let others debate the existence of evil at large while he probed the secrets of the human heart.